GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — As Stacy Peck watched Target 8’s searing portrait of heroin’s homeless, she couldn’t believe her eyes.
She recognized the desperate man in front of the camera.
“I said, ‘That’s a kid I went to school with, and he’s a good person,'” Peck said.
Tyler Trowbridge, 34 and homeless in Grand Rapids, had agreed to let Target 8 follow him as he begged for money and shot drugs in a restaurant bathroom.
Peck knew him as a member of her 2003 graduating class at Grant High School.
“He was just a nice guy,” recalled Peck.
She remembered the high school drummer as low-key but big-hearted.
“I don’t know really how else to describe it,” she said. “You just have a good feeling about someone, and I think everybody else we went to school with had that same feeling.”
Now, 15 years out of high school, Peck is a wife and mother living in Forest Hills.
“The fact that (Trowbridge) was homeless, the fact that he had frostbitten hands, just made me feel sick,” Peck said. “It was just like, he can’t go down like this. He’s going to die if he keeps doing this.”
Full story: WOOD TV